Dad owned a pub in the Barossa Valley called the Southern Cross. The scent of cigars and pipes mingled with the perfume women wore, created a sweet, pungent smell. I was only ten years old then but I remember everything real good.

My Dad was six-foot and came from a big Scottish family. He had a broad Glasgow accent and had fought in the war against the Germans in the desert in Africa. Hitler wouldn’t have wanted to mess with Dad. He once put his fist through a brick shit house. I loved him but his moods could turn on a penny. A look would come over his face: the ‘dead stare’. Best not to hang around.

Once a blow-through was having a go at Dad about his accent. Said he couldn’t understand him. Said in the war, the first ones to run were the Scots. Dad kept his head down and polished the glasses but I could see, the dead stare forming. The blokes at the bar picked up their schooners and quietly stood back. In one motion, Dad pulled the man over the bar, threw him on the floor and for one full minute, lay his size 12 work boots (steel capped) in to him. Someone called an ambulance and took the poor bugger away. The cops came and asked questions. No one saw anything.

He had an unusual way of making friends. The Barossa is full of people from Germany and on the first Tuesday of every month, he’d call every German-speaking drinker ‘Adolf’.

“What will it be Adolf? Anything for your mates Goebbels and Goering?”

That was just his way. Some people got offended but if he liked you and you could take a joke, he was a mate for life. People in a small town talk. Marge from the post office told the women in the Country Women’s Association that Dad used to get mail from an Australian journalist who had reported from behind the North Korean and North Vietnamese lines. This guy would write Dad letters and sign them ‘Comrade Burchett’. People said Dad was a communist.

“Better Red than dead,” he’d say and salute the picture of Stalin above the bar.

When he wasn’t doing Adolf Hitler impersonations in the Ladies Lounge, he’d don a grey Russian field coat with a red hammer and sickle badge on the lapel and parade up and down the front bar, singing The Internationale at the top of his voice.

“So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.”

He’d swing his arms like soldiers on parade in Red Square then sidle up to an astonished customer and ask, “What’ll it be comrade?”

The day Aunty Helen and Uncle Ross only brought two bottles of beer for Christmas lunch, I was out the back of the pub shooting butterflies with my slug gun. They arrived in a new red Monaro. My eyes popped out of my head. It was the 350GT type. Aunty Helen put a towel down on the driver’s seat and I was allowed to sit behind the wheel. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to get one of these one day’. I never did.

They lived in a swish house in Waterfall Gully in Adelaide. It had its own creek with a little bridge. There was a big pond with fish in it. I’d only been there once when Aunty Helen took an overdose of sleeping pills. Mum looked after her. She said it was because Helen wanted to have a baby but couldn’t. We never had Christmas lunch at their place. Every year, they came to ours and only bought two bottles of beer.

It was 90 degrees on Christmas morning. Mum was in the kitchen preparing the chicken and prawns like she always did. It didn’t matter if it was 120 degrees, she’d still roast a chook. Dad was flicking her on the bum with a wet tea towel, singing the theme from Rawhide, “Keep them doggies movin!”

I just remembered something. It’s got nothing to do with Christmas or the two bottles of beer. It must have been the year two blokes from Vietnam came to stay. Other blokes from the city came up and there was a meeting. These Vietnamese blokes were young and friendly. They were real educated and spoke French to Mum, who spoke French back.

Mum was a mystery. She’d left the family farm at 19 and lived in Paris. She learnt French and studied at the Sorbonne. She returned to Australia and met my Dad at a dance in Sydney.

These blokes came from Hanoi but if anyone asked, I was to say they came from Saigon. Who’s going to ask a ten-year-old kid anything? I remember they made this prawn, ginger and rice dish. My mouth still waters when I think of it. They laughed when I tried to use chop sticks.

That was the year before Aunty Helen and Uncle Ross bought the Monaro. Dad told them how Aunty and Uncle’s son, cousin Ian, had been conscripted to fight in Vietnam. Ian was fat. He would sit in the old pepper tree out the back of the Southern Cross and pretend I was a North Vietnamese soldier. He was so big and clumsy, I’d sneak up behind him with my toy gun and go, ‘Bang! You’re dead.’ When the Vietnamese guys heard that, they laughed and laughed. A fat white man in a tree. They thought it was a hell of a joke.

Dad put the two bottles of beer in the fridge and poured Aunty Helen and Uncle Ross two ice-cold lagers and sat them down at the dining room table. Grandpa was already seated. He was old. He used to work in a pub too. His wife had died and he lived in an old folk’s home. He didn’t say much but every now and then he’d wink at Dad if Dad said something funny. Aunty put on a show of offering to help Mum in the kitchen but Mum would shoo her away. She would have been shocked if she’d been handed a tea towel.

Dad sat down next to Aunty Helen and started telling her the snake story. I’d heard it before. Aunty Helen was scared of snakes. Real scared. In the story, Dad was working in south west Queensland, helping the council build a road. It was clay country. Grandpa winked at him and Aunty Helen smiled nervously.

“It was hot as hell, like today and there was this family camped in the distance,” Dad said. “I walked over them to say g’day and they had a two-year toddler. They were nice people. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the little tacker had wandered away. You know how kids are, Helen. He was dressed in a baby blue pair of shorts and a white shirt, looking like little Lord Fauntleroy. So off he goes on hands and knees over the clay and in to a river bed. The mother’s yelling ‘David, David, come back!’ But of course, Helen, the kid is only a kid. Know what I mean?”

Helen nodded, patted her bee-hive hair-do and took a gulp of beer.

“The father’s trying to keep calm, as if this sort of thing happens every day but I can tell, he’s real worried. So, we spread out and search. Helen, put yourself in the child’s place. Big blue eyes, an innocent in the world. He sees a nest of tiny slithering things. There’s a big snake, a big female taipan lying next to her darlings and the child is staggering and falling like a man who’s had a big day at the Melbourne Cup.

Helen sat back in her chair. She could see that snake. Uncle Ross toyed with the bon-bons and looked at Grandpa and got a wink in return.

“I’m no medical man but it appears little David put out his pink hand to pat the snake, because that’s where the first strike hit. It’s a little-known fact Helen, that the female taipan, to protect her brood – if that’s the right word – will strike again and again. Poor little tyke never stood a chance. Talk about stumbling in to a nest of vipers. The boy had 60 strike marks all over his body. It was a hell of a sight, I can tell you that. Ah, here’s Mum with the food. I could eat the crutch out of a low flying duck.”

Aunty Helen excused herself and fled to the toilet followed closely by Uncle Ross. They returned just as we finished saying grace.

I hoed in to the prawns and chicken and woofed down the Christmas pudding with the tuppences and sixpences. Then I went outside to play with the dogs. We had two fat Labradors called Rommel and Monty. They were my dogs and slept with me. They were meant to be guard dogs but they barked at everything. ‘Good guard dogs,’ people would say. Not really.

I could hear the adults playing Frank Sinatra and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass records in the lounge. Dad always liked a Sinatra song called ‘You will be my music’. He would hold Mum close and sing the words to her. I liked that because they didn’t always get on. Aunty Helen was dancing with Uncle Ross and Grandpa was nowhere around.

Uncle Ross said, “Jack, lets knock off those two bottles of beer.”

“Nah old mate, lets save ‘em for later. I’ll open another bottle of brandy.”

And off they’d go again, dancing around the lounge, dodging the tinsel hanging down from the ceiling. Mum would turn the music up and let her hair down. She had beautiful jet-black hair and as she danced, it flew like a horse’s mane. Dad stopped for a second to admire her.

It was getting dark when Aunty and Uncle said they’d better mooch off. No one worried about drink driving in those days. We were immune.

Uncle Ross said, “Jack, would you mind if we took those two bottles of beer?”

“No worries,” Dad said as he passed them over in a clinking brown paper bag.

There were kisses and ‘wasn’t it lovely?’ and ‘who’s turn is it next year?’ Adults don’t go. They hang around a lot before any going is got. Uncle Ross blew Mum a flirty kiss and she smiled and did a bashful girly curtsey.

Their car wouldn’t start. The starter motor churned and churned. Even a dumb kid like me knows you’ll flatten the battery. They flattened the battery. Aunty Helen got out of the car and was angry. Her beehive hair-do sagged.

“Geeez, it’s a bloody new car,” she said. “You’d think it’d be a goer with all the money we paid.”

Uncle Ross opened up the hood and stared at the motor. It could have been a Latin text book for all he knew. It was dark when the roadside emergency mechanic arrived 40 minutes later with his yellow flashing light. He was none too happy, it being Christmas.

“There’s the problem,” he said, sniffing his fat fingers. “There’s grog in the carby. Pumped through the whole engine now. Have to pull the motor apart. It’s a tow job, mate.”

Aunty Helen and Uncle Ross were very upset. “It’s obviously kids,” Helen said.

“How about we knock off those beers you bought while you’re waiting?” Dad said.

Dad didn’t wait for an answer but took the long necks out of the bag and used the car door jamb to pop the tops. So, the four of them sat on the front fence, Dad’s arm around Mum’s back, swigging down those two long necks until the tow truck arrived.